What Small and Medium Sized Businesses Need To Know To Prepare Their Business for the New Version of Microsoft Office

What Small and Medium Sized Businesses Need To Know To Prepare Their Business for the New Version of Microsoft Office

By Dave Paradi, MBA, Co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint"
written November 30, 2006

If you are the owner or manager of a small or medium sized business, you don’t have the luxury of having full-time IT staff on hand to evaluate the impact of the new version of Microsoft Office coming in January. This new version includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – all applications you or your staff probably use every day. So what do you need to know?

There are two significant changes coming that may impact your business. But first of all I should say that this new version is not being released until the end of January and will likely only be in use by people who purchase new computers after that date. So the initial impact for the first two quarters of 2007 will be minimal. The larger impact will be starting in the fall when more copies of the new version are in use, but it is best to be prepared for these changes earlier rather than later. If you are looking at buying new computers next year, this will definitely impact you since you will only be able to purchase the new version of Office.

The first big change in the new versions of the Office programs is the user interface. The menu items and drop down lists of commands that we are used to have been replaced by different menu items and a ribbon of commands that is graphical and displays far more of the options that previously were hidden under sub-menus or dialog boxes. The impact in your business will be that staff working on the new version will not be able to ask staff working with the older version how to do things since the appearance is so different. This means that there may be a loss in productivity until your staff learn the new way of doing things in Office 2007. My advice is that you don’t buy the new version without also buying some training and at-desk resources to help staff up the new learning curve.

The second change is perhaps even more significant. In the new version, the file formats have changed. Instead of the familiar file formats of .doc, .xls and .ppt, there are new .docx, .xlsx and .pptx file formats. The impact in your business could be very significant since the new file formats cannot be read by the current version of the Office programs without a download from Microsoft. This means that any files that staff using the Office 2007 programs send to others will be unreadable and if they are sending files to clients, the client may not be able to read them. Here are my suggestions for how to deal with this potential issue. First, ask your staff with Office 2007 to always save files in the Office 2003 formats so that clients and their colleagues can read the files. Second, have everyone download and install the Compatibility Pack from http://office.microsoft.com that will allow your current version of PowerPoint to read and write the new file format.

I hope that this information on the new version of PowerPoint and its potential impact in your business will help you continue to use the Office programs as this transition to the new version takes place over the next few years. Feel free to post this message on small or medium sized business bulletin boards so that others can prepare themselves for this change as well.

Dave Paradi helps presenters strategically use PowerPoint visuals to enhance their presentations. He offers many articles and resources on his web site at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.